Elemental: War of Magic - Early Release?

We are getting reports that the street date for Elemental has been broken. This is one of the downsides of being an indie, we lack sufficient retail clout to get retailers to take our street dates seriously apparently (same thing happened for Demigod).
As a result, we plan to make Elemental available to beta testers TOMORROW (Sunday) as well to pre-order customers ASAP (either tomorrow or first thing Monday).
However, because I have to re-task the IT team to do this, I'm going to have to have us delay the multiplayer server availability until later this week - Tuesday - the original release date - or Wednesday in all likelihood). It won't affect the single player, campaign, or modding.

I have a lot of respect for how Brad runs his company. Its little things like this that I like to see from a company. Really sucks for him that his release dates are being broken but he is good to his customers and understands what they are thinking. I could wait and would be ok with that but I wont turn away an early release if they offer it. Apparently I didn't preorder early enough to get into one of the betas and its still not showing in my queue so I guess I waiting anyway.

It isn't because he is an indie developer that it broke the release date. It happens all the time even with the big publishers and developers and can be worse then a couple of days. I have seen retailers break the release date a week before release.

It just hurts them harder than the big guys more than likely. Not that its really good in either case. As an early torrent would just reduce sales by that much more and stardock does not use aggressive DRM . Apparently that happened with the last big release they had.

Anyway, they charged my card and servers are up at least for preorders to download it would seem.

The Gold release looks much better that Beta 4 did. I played it for an hour last night, the interface has changed slightly and a lot more information is available on the main screen. I'm thoroughly enjoying it , highly recommended for people who like Civ. and MOM.

Originally Posted by shaf
The Gold release looks much better that Beta 4 did. I played it for an hour last night, the interface has changed slightly and a lot more information is available on the main screen. I'm thoroughly enjoying it , highly recommended for people who like Civ. and MOM.

I'll post more thoughts once the day 0 patch is released tomorrow.

Nice to hear your comments. Looking forward to play after some initial patches.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
T… it seems rather rushed and "rough". Though with a lot of potential.

Yup, that'd be my review after playing an hour.

A few other things: There are some significant interface changes from beta 4 that are confusing but maybe just to us who did the betas. Some of the annoying interface bugs are still there. The narrator's voice work is not good. The campaign's opening few combats are quite difficult and winning is mostly luck.

I played one game yesterday on normal and after taking 3 villages from my enemy I got hit so hard I had to run for my life to avoid my king to get crushed to a pulp. Lost two villages quickly and might loose third if I dont figure out somthing soon.

The game is challenging, interesting and fun. I dont know even half of the stuff what it has and I have been in beta for year now. They tuned up the release version from beta and it shows. Also Im sure they will release many patches still and expansions to improve it. First patch was released allready. Not that the game is fun allready.

I ordered the limited edition because i got it cheap (preorder year ago), because it has good content (i.e world lore book) and the game is exceptional among modern day strategy games.

-- “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
"Those who dont read history are destined to repeat it."– Edmund Burke